From Tokyo: In a country where the Friday call to prayer still marks the rhythm of daily life, Saturday morning in Tehran began like any other working day. Then the bombs fell.
Within roughly twelve hours of the first explosions rocking central Tehran, the world had changed. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had ruled Iran with absolute authority since 1989, was dead. The Islamic Republic's most senior military commanders had been killed alongside him. And the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which roughly 20 per cent of the world's seaborne oil travels each day, had been declared closed by Iran's Revolutionary Guard. The speed of it all was staggering.
The joint operation, codenamed Operation Epic Fury by the United States Pentagon and Operation Roaring Lion by Israel, began at approximately 5:30pm AEDT on 28 February, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Locals reported hearing blasts in Tehran and at military installations across the country. Within an hour, US President Donald Trump had released a video address confirming what was already obvious: "A short time ago, the United States began major combat operations in Iran," he said, framing the offensive as a defensive act against imminent threats. Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz separately confirmed Israel had launched what he called a "preemptive attack" to remove threats against the state of Israel.
The scale of the Israeli air campaign was extraordinary. The Israel Defence Forces later claimed to have conducted what it described as the largest military flyover in IDF history, with 200 jets striking missile arrays and aerial defence systems across western and central Iran, hitting more than 500 targets, as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald. The US had spent months preparing the ground for this moment: two aircraft carriers, the USS Gerald R. Ford and the USS Abraham Lincoln, had been deployed to the region as part of a military build-up that began in January, representing the largest US military build-up in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
What makes the speed of events so difficult to absorb is how abruptly diplomacy gave way to war. Just two days before the strikes, Oman's Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr Albusaidi had told CBS News he was confident a peace deal was within reach after Iran agreed to degrade its stockpiles of enriched nuclear material and cease further stockpiling. On 27 February, Albusaidi publicly described the latest round of negotiations as showing "significant progress." Trump said he preferred diplomacy but would keep military options open. Twenty-four hours later, the bombs were already falling.
The list of confirmed dead on the Iranian side grew through the night. An IDF spokesman claimed the strikes had killed Defence Council Secretary Ali Shamkhani, Revolutionary Guard Commander Mohammad Pakpour, Defence Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh, Khamenei's chief military secretary Mohammad Shirazi, and the chairman of Iran's nuclear weapons research organisation, Hossein Jabal Amelian. Iranian state media confirmed Khamenei's death in a brief statement, with a state television presenter breaking down in tears on air, telling viewers the supreme leader had, in translation, "tasted the drink of martyrdom," according to 9News. Others could be heard weeping off-screen.
Iran's retaliation was swift and broad. Missiles and drones were launched at Israeli cities, at US military installations across the Gulf including Al Udeid airbase in Qatar, the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, and facilities in Kuwait, Jordan, and the UAE, as Al Jazeera reported. A fire broke out at Dubai International Airport, where four people were injured, and at the Fairmont The Palm Hotel on Dubai's Palm Jumeirah. The IRGC began broadcasting high-frequency radio warnings to ships in the Strait of Hormuz that no vessel was permitted to pass. Bloomberg reported that oil and gas shipping in the strait was largely paused, while shipping firm Hapag-Lloyd suspended all movements through the waterway until further notice. Analysts at S&P Global warned that if Iran escalated by seizing tankers or deploying drones against commercial traffic, voyage costs for Middle East oil exports would surge sharply.
Among the most harrowing reports of the night came from southern Iran, where Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi said on X that a missile strike had hit a girls' primary school in the town of Minab. Iran's Health Ministry spokesman later said more than 100 children had been killed. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the attacks in sweeping terms, calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities and warning that failure to de-escalate risked "a wider regional conflict with grave consequences for civilians and regional stability." The identity of the weapon responsible for the school strike had not been independently confirmed at time of writing.
There is a serious case to be made for the strategic logic underlying the strikes. Iran's nuclear programme has long been regarded as an existential threat by Israel and a proliferation risk by Western governments. The regime had, by multiple accounts, responded to the most recent round of diplomacy in a way that still fell short of Washington's three core demands: a permanent end to all uranium enrichment, strict limits on its ballistic missile programme, and a complete halt to support for proxy groups. Khamenei's government had also faced massive domestic protests since late 2025, with estimates of those killed by state repression ranging from thousands to tens of thousands. Trump's appeal to Iranians to "take over your government" was not without resonance in some quarters: CNN reported celebrations in some Tehran streets upon news of Khamenei's death, and the Iranian diaspora in Los Angeles marked the occasion openly.
The counterarguments, though, carry real weight and cannot be dismissed as naive. Critics, including US Senator Bernie Sanders, characterised the operation as a "premeditated and unconstitutional war" launched without a congressional declaration. France's Emmanuel Macron warned of "grave consequences for international peace and security." Spain's prime minister openly rejected the strikes as an escalation that made the international order less stable. The Omani mediator, who had been in Washington just the day before assuring officials that a deal was close, wrote publicly that he was "dismayed" and urged the US not to be "sucked in further." Analysts at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington wrote that the US-Israel coalition appeared to have moved beyond targeting Iran's nuclear programme and was now seeking to destroy the Iranian government entirely, describing the conflict as already having spread across more than half a dozen countries within hours of the first strikes. That is not a surgical counter-proliferation operation. It is a war.
For Australia, the events of 28 February carry particular weight. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese backed the US action in a joint statement with Defence Minister Richard Marles and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, citing Iran's decades as a "destabilising force" through its missile and nuclear programmes and its support for armed proxies. Albanese also pointed to Iran's role in directing at least two attacks on Australian soil targeting the Jewish community in 2024, which had contributed to Australia severing diplomatic relations with Iran last August. The government upgraded its travel advice for Israel and Lebanon to "Do Not Travel" and urged any Australians remaining in Iran to leave immediately, with consular officials deployed to the Iran-Azerbaijan border to assist those seeking to exit. Foreign Minister Wong acknowledged that more than 4,000 Australians had registered for help leaving the region.
The Australian Greens mounted an immediate challenge to the government's position, arguing Labor had "outsourced Australian foreign policy to Washington" and that facilities such as Pine Gap in the Northern Territory may have played a role in the targeting of strikes. Albanese, when pressed repeatedly on whether Australia had any involvement in the operation, replied each time that it was "unilateral action taken by the United States." The question of Pine Gap's role was not directly answered.
What comes next is genuinely uncertain, and reasonable people disagree sharply about whether this represents a reckless gamble or a necessary reckoning with a regime that was never going to voluntarily relinquish its nuclear ambitions. The hardest question is not whether Khamenei's Iran posed a threat; it clearly did. The harder question is whether the method chosen, a decapitation strike that has ignited retaliatory attacks across the Gulf and threatened the world's most critical oil chokepoint, will produce the stability its architects intended, or whether it has simply lit a fire whose size no one yet can calculate.